works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

Generally just words and thoughts on the progress of my day-to-day.

  • lucid professionalism

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What made your job
    interesting in 2025?

    Some people may incorrectly tell you that technically I don’t have a job.

    They are wrong.

    I am not traditionally employed these days, true, but I do in a very real sense work for myself… which is a huge job and a lot of work.

    Living the dream… or maybe the nightmare. It really does depend on the perspective and the day of the week… and how much sleep I got last night.

    This state of existence is very much a privileged position emerging from a stable household income, a lack of consumer or property debt, and probably most importantly (I’m not even kidding) living a frugal lifestyle… at least relatively speaking. If anyone seriously asks looking for a serious answer I usually just tell them that we simply don’t buy anything we don’t actually need. We’re shitty consumers. We eat groceries not commercially prepared food.  We travel for adventure and experience, not for luxury or clout. We shop to replace, repair and maintain, not to own more stuff. 

    But I digress. 

    This state of privilege has allowed me to spin up a sole-employee, self-owned small corporation and do bit contract work as a means to keep my skills sharp and my days structured, while still leaving a tremendous amount of free time to do everything from write fiction, dabble in side projects, make art, and hang out with the dog.

    In the two and a half years since jumping ship on my last full-time gig, I have written extensively (mostly in private journals that will never be published) about the transition from salaryman middle-manager in a municipal government job to bumbling self-employed creative eking out a pittance of a living doing gigs. And as it turns out both roles are stressful, but in unique and different ways. The government work was the stress of deep accountability at multiple levels, accountability to a demanding public, to a corporate hierarchy, to direct reports, to technical fidelity, to process and security, to vendor contract fairness and a long list of other deep and abiding struggles that kept me awake into the wee hours of the night. The contractor work is the stress of building reputation, honest effort, uncertainty of next week, and the dark spectre of knowing that I am every role in my own company and no one is there to prop up any shortcomings if I forget to do something important.

    And yet in my lucid and rational moments, as much as I occasionally get that grass-is-greener mentality looking across the gap from present to past self, I am definitely happier and healthier where I am now. 

    The daily variety of living this type of professional existence is both humbling and exciting. 

    Yesterday I was reflecting on this same notion from the perspective of perspective itself: what part of this transition am I leaving behind, and in effect giving myself permission to pull down the metaphorical scaffolding of this professional notion I hold of myself as fixedly capable, instead looking to the broader variety of both gig and term jobs I could take on. Why? Because a year ago I was in a very different place as a guy (temporarily) working part-time day-by-day for a small company job that I had stepped into to fill the void of structure and a paycheque. And it turns out those are the two exactly wrong pieces that drive what makes this stage of my professional life interesting. Sure, I need to get paid… who the hell doesn’t? And sure, having something to do when I wake up each morning is important. But both of those things are somehow right now, in this privileged moment secondary to the adventure of dabbling and learning and contributing to interesting work efforts that I would never have encountered as a middle manager in government.

    It is a bit of a dream, after all. A bit surreal. A bit hard to explain clearly to anyone not experiencing it. And something that I know I will need to awake from …and then return to reality. But it sure as hell has been interesting, if nothing else.

  • cheap-ish therapy

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Who or what are you
    leaving behind in 2025?

    I was reading over old posts. I mean, half the reason I write this damn blog is that, as they say, writing is cheaper than therapy. That is to say… these words are mostly for me. It is a public journal of a sort, after all, with the key part of that being the notion of a journal.

    Four years ago (to the day) I wrote a post called “Another Life Reset” in which in my first year of writing these reflective posts I lamented on the state of my life as a bureaucratic pencil-pushing middle manager staring down the barrel of another decade or two in government IT work. It was the middle of a pandemic, after all, and my life had become something of a chaos train of salaryman red tape and taking on the stress and angst of a team full of web nerds who were spinning through a time of societal change and whathaveyou. I was deeply burnt out. Charred from the inside core and right out to the part where I was a bit of a zombie. It would take me another year or so, but I manifested that “life reset” and left that job for an open-ended pursuit. 

    It has not been a simple reset. 

    I have rolled through a small collection of random work, a laundry list of job interviews, re-training programs, and kick-starting my own small business.  And oddly enough, in the middle of so much risk and change and idealism it has been the spirit of the reset that has been the one thing pushed off to the side.

    I might even admit I’ve panicked a little bit.

    It is the thing to do, after all, when facing uncertainty. In the what-will-be two and a half years since I left my (un)comfortable stable income as a municipal employee I have found myself drifting back to the idea of that stability as a core tenant of my search rather than the reset that it was supposed to have articulated in my life. That is to say, I’ve been interviewing and pursuing familiar jobs that would literally reboot my currently reset life back into the same program.

    Not that it has worked.

    And I mean, look—the world is a crazy complex place right now.  It’s an employers market. I’m now less than a year away from fifty, and the whole notion of so-called career is as fuzzy as my chin on a Saturday morning. I kinda need to reset from the reset: to rethink the whole approach.

    I tell myself that over and over, but honestly it comes down to personal expectations and this lingering thought that I need a kind of self-granted permission to do something crazy.

    So that’s what I’m leaving behind. I’ve been thinking about it for a few months now, actually. My expectation for what this all looks like if and when it ever reboots needs to have a secondary reset. A purge of expectations. It is a leaving behind of mental frameworks for my professional self and looking ahead to a job that does more than “keep me busy” but rather gives back to the world in a meaningful way that counterbalances the whole drudgery of employment.

    I’ve set the pieces in place in 2025. Now it is time to pull down the scaffolding of my old concept of professional self and reveal what is possible. How’s that for some cheap therapy online, huh?

  • weekend wrap, twenty one

    October turned to November and with just a couple months left in 2025 its tough not to get all waxy poetic here. We have a vacation incoming this month, I finished my summer work, I completed my October challenge of suburban sketching, and I don’t have much going on in the training department (at least until we’re back from our trip.)

    That said, this first weekend of November was busy-ish:

    Friday night was Halloween, obviously. We’ve been going thru this transition while the Kid was in High School where she no longer hung out with her old man to go out and do Halloweenie things. As a result, through most of high school we spent October 31st evening camped in our living room to hand out candy to the fewer-than-twenty kids who wandered by.  This year, we ditched. She’s in Uni and opted to stay home and take over the candy biz (for what turned out to be ten kids total) and we went over to C&A’s house for an “empty nesters” jam. Sure, we’re not quite empty nesting, but some days the Kid no longer being a kid hits more real. 

    Saturday was chill. I barely got off the couch, if I’m being honest. We got our annual flu shots on Friday afternoon, so by Saturday I was feeling the residual ache of my immune system reacting. I spent some time on my 8r4d-stagram code base—which consequently noted turns three years old today!— and made a couple more pre-trip tweaks to the place I’ll be posting most of my photos.

    We made stew for supper and settled in to watch a movie. Chill.

    Sunday morning was daylight savings time. It was the good one… the extra hour of sleep one. The dog didn’t care and wanted her breakfast at the regular time tho, so I’ll have to claim my extra hour incrementally over the next couple weeks as I adjust her to the time change.

    We met and ran eight klicks in the chilly pre-winter air. It was harder than it should have been, but my whole body is kinda settling in for the season I think. I need to re-energize before our trip somehow, but maybe candy, slouching, and flu shot were not the way.

    And then as sort of an epic conclusion to the weekend, the Kid, I and nine of the run clubbers met at West Edmonton Mall to go to the IMAX rerelease of Back to the Future in celebration of it’s 40th anniversary. That was the real party. 

  • weekend wrap, twenty

    I guess this was the final weekend in October, huh? I started this month with a personal art challenge, drawing every day, and so far I’ve kept up my end of the deal. But somehow whenever I immerse myself it the act of doing something daily over the span of a month it seems to speed up time and I blink and… well, it was the final weekend of October.

    Friday evening was a tiny little self-contained adventure.

    I had to go pick up my race package from the store up near Whyte Avenue. The wife had a little AGM meeting to attend with a big purpose right near there. Her meeting was for a board she sits on and it was the meeting when they were electing a new president to replace her—happily so—since the kid is no longer doing that particular extra curricular thing and she doesn’t need to run the organization and fundraise for other kids, huh? 

    I dropped her off and drove up to the Running Room and grabbed my race shirt and bib. Ran into Kim, because she was working, and PS, because he was also picking up his package at the exact same time.

    I got it into my mind to go back to the store where I bought my little sketchbook, the one I’ve been doing all my drawing in for the challenge this month. It turns out that they are only sold at like three places in the city, and one of those places was on Whyte Avenue. But Whyte Avenue, the city’s gentrified Uni-adjacent trendy shopping strip is a terrible place to try and go casually on a Friday evening. I could not find parking—at least not some free parking (and I was feeling a bit too cheap to pay) so I ended up driving laps around the neighbourhoods for a while until I got frustrated and just decided to try to drive back to the studio to pick up the wife… which is when I got trapped in a construction zone hell and it took me twenty minutes and a few middle fingers to navigate.

    I picked her up and we decided since it was almost 8pm to finally grab a dinner. There is a little sushi and rice bowl place on the way home so we swung in there and ordered, and as she hands us our food in to-go bowls (confusingly) she told us that they were closing at 8 and we could only stay if we ate fast. Ugh. So we ate our sad little bowls at home twenty minutes later and settled in to watch some television.

    I got paid for a couple of my contracts last week, so on Saturday morning I made my way to the store to (finally!) replace my laptop. I’ve been working on a mix of (a) the shared family computer, (b) a ten year old gaming desktop in my cold, cold basement, (c) a fourteen year old recycled MacBook Pro hacked to run Linux and (d) a six year old iPad that is starting to show its age. Since setting up the corporation I’ve always known that the best tax approach is to use the money and invest back into the company rather than pull it out as salary and pay a bunch of taxes on it. So, new laptop for the business was bought… and then most of the afternoon setting it up and getting all the softwares installed on it.

    We had a lite dinner and settled in for some more television on Saturday evening.

    Sunday I woke up to rain. Rain is not inherently bad, but Sunday morning was also race morning and I looked out the back door as even the dog refused to step out and tried not to think that I needed to be at a start line in a couple hours to run sixteen klicks.

    I met the gang for a carpool over to the race and we were plenty early to spend time wandering around and overthinking the weather. Of course, soon enough the race was run and it being the first real race I’ve done in over a year (Park Runs apparently don’t count, but they’re also only 5k) I was spent. 

    We piled in and went for a late lunch at some enormous asian buffet place on the north side that I’d never even heard of, and I stuffed myself to borderline feeling ill.  

    I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening recovering from the race (and lunch) and went to bed at a far too reasonable time for a guy with nothing much to do on Monday morning except write.

  • weekend wrap, nineteen

    The more exciting of recent weekend was the Thanksgiving long weekend, last weekend, but of course by the time I remembered that I should sit down and recap it—or should I say, by the time I had the time to recap it, it was already getting on late Wednesday and I couldn’t bring myself to reflecting on a weekend that was already a few days passed. 

    This weekend…

    It started off with that empty nest vibe when The Kid took off to an overnighter party outside of town. There’s a whole story to why her and another girl went an hour out of the city to hang out with some rural peers in a small town east of here, but the short of it is that it left Karin and I to fend for ourselves. Our option was to go out for pizza and then crash on the couch to watch some teevee.

    I got up at a respectable time and launched myself over to Park Run. It was my eleventh partaking of the river valley five klick weekly race. That sounds good, but those eleven runs have taken place over three-plus years. I logged a twenty-eight minutes and change time, tho not my best was still better than I was expecting. I’ve always floated around that thirty minute mark as an objective standard, so breaking through that is a net positive day out.

    I burned off the bulk of the day doing some coding and sketching and playing some video games. The temperatures have dropped and I was still trying to warm up from running Park Run in two degrees and shorts.

    We made pizza for dinner. Yeah, two nights in a row with the pizza, but my homemade pizza is just a completely different category than the stuff we get at the local family pizzeria.

    We curled up on the couch again and watched a movie that evening. I’ve had this obscure science fiction film on my watchlist for the better part of fifteen years, but I’ve been struggling to find a copy even to buy. But then the other week it showed up on one of the services we pay for, so I flagged it and didn’t ask—just put it on and watched all of its weirdness. 

    Sunday morning I led the group on a ten klick taper run. Our race is next weekend, so after peaking at sixteen klicks (the race is a ten miler) last weekend, we eased off the gas and fed a bit of recovery into our training plan.

    My afternoon was a bunch of chores. We had to run over to Home Depot for some bits and bops, and then a bunch of new sheet music came in over the email for our rehearsal tonight so I got busy uploading that and then fixing a tiny bug I noticed in the code I had recently posted for managing all that sheet music and so the I blinked and it was late afternoon and time for making my sketch of the day.

    I ran into one of our long lost runners in the park. LS hasn’t been seen since May—at least not by any of the crew—and then there he was. So we stood there and chatted a bit and it turns out he’s been really sick and trying to sort through that. But he seems as much on the mend as is possible and I told him he really should stop by for coffee and assure people that he didn’t die and we’d all missed his funeral or something.

    Dinner and more video games capped off the evening, and I was reminded that the long weekend would have been much more exciting to write about, huh?